Not to call you out, but how do you know that 23.45.67.89 was not, at one point, Google.com’s IP address? IP addresses do change over time, after all, and it seems a bit silly to assume somebody who knows enough about DNS functionality to illustrate it in a comic to be incapable of performing a simple “ping google.com” in a command line to find out its true IP address…

:/ 23.45.67.89 was never, at any point, Google’s IP Address. Maybe, just maybe, it was for the sake of simplicity that the creator used 2-9 just to get the idea across to new internet users seeing as IP addresses can change and this picture cannot.

And just to further illustrate my point, pinging Google.com gives me 74.125.31.138, not 74.125.127.104. Both addresses are operational as of this time of writing, but it further illustrates that not only do IP addresses change over time, but companies like Google have several different servers, each of which carrying their own addresses. There is no *one* address which points to Google.com.

Google runs multiple data centers, each with multiple IP addresses. The way it works is it sends the request to the closest data center that can manage you at the time. Basically the whole system is an entire fallback if one of the centers goes out, there is another that can process you. The reason that the IP 23.45.67.89 is implied to be made up is because of the consecutive numbers.
(Plus that IP is a class A IP that is assigned to ARIN)